Jeff Sutherland Quotes

No Heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.

Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does.

Greatness can’t be imposed; it has to come from within. But it does live within all of us.

The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions: 1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way? That’s it. That’s the whole meeting.

That absolute alignment of purpose and trust is something that creates greatness.

Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.

People aren't happy because they're successful. They're successful because they're happy.

Each cycle J.J. would talk to the team and ask three very simple questions: What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?

Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t.

It was the Scrum Master’s job to guide the team toward continuous improvement—to ask with regularity, “How can we do what we do better?” Ideally, at the end of each iteration, each Sprint, the team would look closely at itself—at its interactions, practices, and processes—and ask two questions: “What can we change about how we work?” and “What is our biggest sticking point?” If those questions are answered forthrightly, a team can go faster than anyone ever imagined.

the people who multitask the most just can’t focus.

observar, orientarse, decidir y actuar. Asimilaba

In software development there’s a term called “Brooks’s Law” that Fred Brooks first coined back in 1975 in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Put simply, Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8 This has been borne out in study after study.

At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that.

The thing that cripples communication saturation is specialization—the number of roles and titles in a group. If people have a special title, they tend to do only things that seem a match for that title. And to protect the power of that role, they tend to hold on to specific knowledge.

Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

Embrace the unknown! That’s where learning lies! If you’re too afraid to learn, you will never get any better. This is the key to being successful at Scrum: embrace change.

aunque planear el combate es importante, los planes se evaporan en cuanto suena el primer disparo.

Never do betas. Never do work that you don’t think is good. You either give your customer something good, or you don’t. There is no ‘try’.

Number of Simultaneous Projects Percent of Time Available per Project Loss to Context Switching 1 100% 0% 2 40% 20% 3 20% 40% 4 10% 60% 5 5% 75%

Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.

The human mind has limits. We can only remember so many things; we can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. This tendency—for the process of fixing things to get harder as more time elapses—represents a similar limitation. When you’re working on a project, there’s a whole mind space that you create around it. You know all the different reasons why something is being done. You’re holding a pretty complicated construct in your head. Re-creating that construct a week later is hard. You have to remember all the factors that you were considering when you made that choice. You have to re-create the thought process that led you to that decision. You have to become your past self again, put yourself back inside a mind that no longer exists. Doing that takes time. A long time. Twenty-four times as long as it would take if you had fixed the problem when you first discovered it.

Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose. But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool. Just as critical, but perhaps less celebrated, is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best—to have autonomy. On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.

The problem that I frequently see crop up is that people have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as simply individual reporting. “I did this … I’ll do that”—then on to the next person. The more optimum approach is closer to a football huddle. A wide receiver might say, “I’m having a problem with that defensive lineman,” to which an offensive blocker might respond, “I’ll take care of that. I’ll open that line.” Or the quarterback might say, “Our running game is hitting a wall; let’s surprise them with a pass to the left.” The idea is for the team to quickly confer on how to move toward victory—i.e., complete the Sprint. Passivity is not only lazy, it actively hurts the rest of the team’s performance. Once spotted, it needs to be eliminated immediately.

The fact is, when you look at the best teams—like the ones that existed at Toyota or 3M when Takeuchi or Nonaka wrote their paper, or the ones at Google or Salesforce.com or Amazon today—there isn’t this separation of roles.

Actually showing the product was powerful, because people were, to put it mildly, skeptical of the team’s reported progress. They just couldn’t believe Sentinel’s progress actually kept moving at a faster and faster rate.

Money for Nothing and Change for Free

I didn’t want to pick on him, but the fact is, in project after project, people cut and paste and throw in boilerplate, but no one actually reads all those thousands of pages.

Plus, the effort to “exercise firm control” doesn’t even work! Even with Change Control Boards trying to limit changes, the need for change is so great that they’re often overruled.

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

James Grenning, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Kenji Hiranabe, Greg Hutchings, Michael James, Clinton Keith, Joshua Kerievsky, Janne Kohvakka (and team), Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Shiv Kumar MN, Kuroiwa-san, Diana Larsen, Timo Leppänen, Eric Lindley, Steven Mak, Shiva-kumar Manjunathaswamy, Brian Marick, Bob Martin, Gregory Melnik, Emerson Mills, John Nolan, Roman Pichler, Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck, Jukka Savela, Ken Schwaber, Annapoorani Shanmugam, James Shore, Maarten Smeets, Jeff Sutherland, Dave Thomas, Ville Valtonen, and Xu Yi.

Todos os homens sonham, mas não de forma equivalente. Aqueles que sonham à noite, nos recessos empoeirados de suas mentes, acordam de dia e descobrem que tudo aquilo eram futilidades, mas os sonhadores do dia são homens perigosos, pois eles podem agir de acordo com os seus sonhos, de olhos abertos, para torná-los possíveis. — T. E. Lawrence, Os sete pilares da sabedoria

He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives.

Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act

Everything is top priority. The adage to keep in mind comes from Frederick II of Prussia, later to be called “the Great”: “He who will defend everything defends nothing.” By not concentrating both your resources and your mental energies, you thin them out to irrelevancy.

Managers often don’t want other managers, their own teams, or other people within the power structure to know exactly what they’re doing or what is being accomplished and how fast.

A todos nos han dicho que llenar correctamente un formulario es más importante que hacer la labor respectiva o que debemos celebrar una reunión para preparar la reunión previa a la reunión. Es aberrante. Pero no dejamos de hacerlo, pese a que sea un completo y absoluto fracaso

Si al final del sprint algo quedó a medias, estarás peor que si no hubieras hecho nada. Has gastado recursos, tiempo y esfuerzo sin llevar nada a un estado susceptible de entrega.

It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss. Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.4

An unreadable stack of paper had become understandable pieces of work. It’s like that old saw, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It’s not enough to think people are happy. I want you to be a scientist about it: quantify it and equate it with performance. If something doesn’t match up, there’s a problem. It’s great to go to the pub with your team and bond. But it doesn’t do the company a lot of good if that bonding doesn’t actually translate into better performance. There are a lot of people I hang with just for fun. With my team I want that social aspect to move directly into performance. And

that is one of the great things about Scrum—OpenView discovered how people actually work instead of how they say they work.

¿A quién le importa cuántas horas trabajó alguien en algo? Lo relevante es que se entregue rápido y sea de gran calidad.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

El trabajo no tiene por qué ser enojoso. Puede fluir; puede ser una expresión de dicha, un acoplamiento hacia un propósito más alto. Podemos mejorar. ¡Podemos ser excelentes! Sólo tenemos que practicar.

If a company isn’t making money, you don’t have a successful venture; you have a hobby.

As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in individual performance; I’m only interested in team performance. I can double a team’s productivity in a month, but an individual? That could take a year. And a whole bunch of individuals? A whole division? A whole company? That could take forever. So I use transparency to focus on improving the team. I find that the team itself usually can address individual performance issues.

Happy people simply do better—at home, at work, in life. They make more money, they have better jobs, they graduate from college, and they live longer. It’s quite remarkable. Almost universally they’re just better at what they do.

1. On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company? 2. On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole? 3. Why do you feel that way? 4. What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?

The team takes that one top improvement and makes it the most important thing to do in the next Sprint—with acceptance tests. How can you prove you’ve made that improvement? You need to define what success is in a concrete, actionable way, so that in the next Sprint Retrospective it’s really easy to see if you achieved the kaizen.

be conscious of the cost of context switching. It’s very real, and you should try to minimize it.

If you can’t actually take time off without having to make sure everything is going right at the office, the thinking goes, you aren’t managing your teams well.

Cada vez que se hacen transferencias entre equipos hay riesgo de desastres. Como

Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose.

There were 1,100 requirements. The stack was a few inches thick,” says Johnson. Just thinking about those documents makes me feel for the people who had probably spent weeks of their lives producing those documents that had no purpose.

What Scrum does is bring teams together to create great things, and that requires everyone not only to see the end goal, but to deliver incrementally toward that goal.

people who work for those contractors aren’t stupid; they knew better. The problem was, everyone said, “Not my job.” They delivered their piece and left it at that. They never looked at the site from the user’s point of view, merely from their own. The reason they could do that was that they weren’t aligned—weren’t united in a common purpose.

The transparency and sharing of a truly fantastic team threatens structures rooted in secrets and obfuscation.

Aunque fue necesario proyectar varias veces ese video, mi equipo de programadores de computadoras ligeramente fuera de forma empezó a hablar por fin de qué podía hacer para asemejarse a aquella escuadra. Dio así con cuatro aspectos dignos de emulación. El primero fue intensa concentración en la meta, producida y reforzada por el cántico maorí. El segundo, la colaboración radical: brazos y cuerpos unidos en pos del mismo objetivo. El tercero, ansia de aplastar: todo lo que se interpusiera en su camino debía ser eliminado. El cuarto, entusiasmo universal cuando un jugador se abría paso con la pelota. No importaba quién lo hiciera, que sucediera era motivo de celebración.

Scrum doesn't solve your problems; it just makes them painfully visible.

Las compañías que siguen adhiriéndose a ideas probadas pero falsas de mando y control y que intentan imponer una predictibilidad rígida están condenadas al fracaso si sus competidores usan Scrum;

Pero en lugar de abandonarlo, o de abandonar la forma en que se le concibió, los directivos contratan gente para que haga parecer que funciona. En esencia, pagan para que se les mienta.

Planning Is Useful. Blindly Following Plans Is Stupid.

Ben-Shahar writes: “We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys.

That’s short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. And while it may sound funny on the tongue, it’s deadly in war and in business. Getting inside someone’s loop reduces them to confusion and doubt. They overreact and underreact.

Get Better Every Day—and Measure It. At the end of each Sprint, the team should pick one small improvement, or kaizen, that will make them happier. And that should become the most important thing they’ll accomplish in the next Sprint.

Para ser eficaz, esta reunión requiere cierto grado de madurez emocional y una atmósfera de confianza. La clave es que no se busca a quién culpar; se examina el proceso. ¿Por qué las cosas resultaron así? ¿Por qué no pudimos hacerlas de otra manera? ¿Qué pudimos hacer más rápido? Es crucial que, como equipo, la gente asuma la responsabilidad de su proceso y resultados y busque soluciones como equipo. También debe tener fortaleza para sacar a colación los asuntos que le molestan en una forma orientada a la solución, no acusatoria. Y el resto del equipo debe tener madurez para oír esos comentarios, aceptarlos y buscar una solución en vez de ponerse a la defensiva.

Suffice it to say here that the effect of eliminating waste is dramatic, but people often don’t do it, because it requires being honest with themselves and with others.

Esta metodología permite a los equipos obtener realimentación sobre su trabajo casi en tiempo real. ¿Están siguiendo la dirección correcta? ¿Lo que, según sus planes, deben hacer después es realmente lo que deberían hacer, considerando lo que ya descubrieron en el ciclo que acaban de concluir? En Scrum, llamamos sprints a estos ciclos. Al inicio de cada sprint hay una junta de planeación. El equipo decide entonces cuánto cree poder hacer en las dos semanas siguientes. Toma las tareas de la lista de prioridades y las escribe en papeletas adhesivas que pega en la pared. Luego decide cuántas de esas tareas puede llevar a cabo en las dos semanas siguientes.

When you’re writing stories or making a list of work to be done, it’s important to ask two questions: Is the story ready? And how will you know when it’s done?

People don’t multitask because they’re good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity

It was because they made a very basic mistake. They thought they could plan everything ahead of time. They spent months of effort making the sort of detailed plans that seem plausible—that are laid out on pretty charts and include carefully precise steps and almost always describe a fictional reality.

Es absurdo culpar. No busques malas personas, sino malos sistemas: aquellos que incentivan la mala conducta y premian el bajo rendimiento.

Interfuncional. El equipo debe tener todas las habilidades necesarias para terminar un proyecto, así su misión sea entregar software de Salesforce o capturar terroristas en Iraq.

Prefiere lo chico. Los equipos reducidos trabajan más rápido que los grandes. La regla son siete miembros, dos de más o de menos. Peca de cicatero.

Jala la palanca correcta. Cambia el desempeño de tu equipo. Este desempeño tiene mucho más influencia –en varios órdenes de magnitud– que el individual.

Trascendencia. Los grandes equipos tienen un propósito mayor que el individual; por ejemplo, sepultar al general MacArthur, ganar el campeonato de la NBA.

La felicidad conduce al éxito en casi todos los terrenos de la vida, como matrimonio, salud, amistad, participación comunitaria y creatividad, y en particular en nuestro trabajo, carrera y negocios.1

La idea es que si no puedes tomar un descanso sin tener que confirmar que todo marcha bien en la oficina, no diriges bien a tus equipos.

Maxwell dice que quienes trabajan demasiado empiezan a cometer errores, cuya corrección, como ya vimos, puede implicar más esfuerzo que crear algo. Quienes trabajan de más se distraen más y distraen a otros. Pronto toman malas decisiones.

Las inquietantes evidencias revelan que tenemos una capacidad muy limitada para tomar decisiones y que cuanto más energía perdemos y menos descansamos, más se reduce esa capacidad.

Este fenómeno se ha llamado “fatiga del ego”. La idea es que tomar cualquier decisión implica un costo de energía. El agotamiento resultante es raro; no te sientes cansado físicamente, pero tu capacidad para tomar buenas decisiones disminuye. Lo que cambia es tu autocontrol, tu capacidad para ser disciplinado, reflexivo y visionario.

La multitarea te embrutece. Hacer más de una cosa al mismo tiempo te vuelve más lento y peor en ambas. No lo hagas. Si crees que esto no se aplica a ti, te equivocas.

Hazlo bien a la primera. Cuando cometas un error, corrígelo al instante. Deja lo demás y ocúpate de él. Corregirlo después puede consumir veinte veces más tiempo, o más, que si lo corriges ahora.

Trabajar demasiado sólo complica las cosas. Trabajar mucho tiempo no permite hacer más, sino menos. Resulta en fatiga, lo que induce errores y esto te obligará a corregir lo que acabas de hacer. Más que trabajar hasta tarde o los fines de semana, hazlo entre semana a un ritmo sostenible. Y tómate unas vacaciones.

No seas irracional. Las metas desafiantes motivan, las imposibles deprimen.

No a los actos heroicos. Si necesitas que un héroe haga las cosas, tienes un problema. El esfuerzo heroico debe entenderse como un error de planeación.

Busca el flujo. Opta por la manera más tersa y sin contratiempos de hacer las cosas. Scrum consiste en permitir el mayor flujo posible.

Planea realidades, no fantasías

¿Qué es más valioso para el proyecto? Hagamos eso primero”.

Una vez en poder de tu lista de actividades ordenada por prioridad debes saber cuánto esfuerzo, tiempo y dinero implicará el proyecto.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.5

No one should spend their lives on meaningless work. Not only is it not good business, it kills the soul.

Sutherland claims Waterfall fails 85 percent of the time in projects that cost over $5 million. In 2004 a study of 250 large software projects found that 70 percent had major delays and cost overruns or were shut down without being completed.

Sutherland and a group of top software development gurus met for three days in 2001 to find an alternative. They hammered out a one-page document called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,

Fail fast so you can fix early. Corporate culture often puts more weight on forms, procedures, and meetings than on visible value creation that can be inspected at short intervals by users. Work that doesn’t produce real value is madness. Working product on short cycles allows early user feedback and you can immediately eliminate what is obviously wasteful effort.

La dinámica de grupos sólo opera correctamente en equipos pequeños. La cifra clásica son siete integrantes, dos de más o de menos, aunque he visto funcionar de maravilla a grupos de apenas tres individuos. Lo asombroso es que los datos demuestran que un equipo de más de nueve se vuelve torpe. En efecto: más recursos hacen más lento a un equipo.

No cenário ideal, ao fim de cada ciclo, de cada sprint, a equipe se autoexaminaria – suas interações, suas práticas e seus processos – e faria duas perguntas: “O que podemos mudar na forma como trabalhamos?” e “Qual é nosso maior ponto de conflito?”. Se essas duas questões forem respondidas de maneira franca, o grupo será capaz de avançar mais rápido do que qualquer um já imaginou.

Man, what a day. Not the worst day of my life, but up there. Top five.